Mind Your Mannerism

An opulent painting that contradicts what the artist stood for.

Everyone has heard of the neglected artistic genius whose talents went undiscovered while he lived, as well as the pompous academician whose worldly successes were forgotten as soon as he died. But these are archetypes of modernist mythology and have little or nothing to do with Western culture before 1800. To a striking degree, the artists whom contemporaries most admired in 1575 are the artists of that age whom we esteem today.

ENLARGE

A PAINTING so opulent and refined it seems to contradict what the artist stood for.
Michael Bodycomb

But there are exceptions to this, and one of them is Scipione Pulzone, whose splendid portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni has just arrived at the Frick Collection, where it will remain on view through Oct. 26. It is part of a diminutive exhibition, "Men in Armor, El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face," that includes one other painting, the Frick's own portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi, by El Greco. The exhibition has been mounted largely to commemorate the 400th anniversary of El Greco's death, but also to explore the depiction of armor in 16th-century painting.

Today Pulzone (c.1540/42-1598) is known almost exclusively to specialists, but in his day he was famous for leading a backlash against Mannerism, that exuberantly overrefined movement—attenuated proportions, high-keyed color and spatial daring—that dominated Italian art through most of the 16th century. In marked contrast to that style, his portraits and religious works represent a call to order, with their sober delineations, sturdy volumes and legible compositions populated by fully frontal figures.

"Let all superstition be removed from sacred images! Let all base profit be eliminated! Let all lasciviousness be avoided!" So thundered the Tridentine Council in 1563. And no artist rose as readily to the summons of the Counter-Reformation as Pulzone, a native of Gaeta in central Italy, who soon became the favorite painter of Pope Gregory XIII. In religious commissions, the force of gravity seems to weigh more heavily on Pulzone's figures, airborne or otherwise, than on those of his great contemporaries Tintoretto and El Greco. One finds these qualities as well in the portraits by which he gained lucrative entrée into the upper echelons of Roman society. A darkness often hedges these portraits, and even some of his earliest, like his fine depiction of Cardinal Granvelle, possess a nothing-but-the-facts precision, in stark contrast to the woozy idealism of mainstream Mannerists.

But, that being the case, how are we to explain his portrait of Boncompagni, now at the Frick? For although it is utterly painstaking in its depiction of the sitter, arrayed in a suit of gleaming armor, its flamboyant display of conspicuous consumption hardly seems either sober or reserved.

The sitter was the illegitimate son of Gregory XIII and, in his day, was a person with clout. Once Gregory became pope, he appointed his son castellan of Castel Sant'Angelo and then head of the Papal Army. Later, King Philip II of Spain named him commander-in-chief of the duchy of Milan.

In Pulzone's portrait, we see Boncompagni (1548-1612) as a young man. According to the Frick's informative catalog, written by Jeongho Park, a curatorial assistant, the painting dates to 1574, the same year the sitter became godfather to Pulzone's first son. There is no psychological penetration in this seated portrait. We are presented with the fully externalized public man. Other than his diminutive hands and neatly coiffed head, his person is imprisoned in a carapace of armor, accented with lace and cloth of gold.

The real glory of the painting is the virtuosity of that suit of armor. Lamplight steals over its burnished black surface, revealing each detail of vambrace, burgonet and pauldron. A closer look at their parcel-gilt elaboration exposes odd grotesqueries, as well as harpies and the god of war. In all, there is a delightful dryness to the depiction, a brittle precision in the register of each prominence and recession of the armor's overwrought form.

The depiction is so refined that the painting as a whole seems—dare one say it?—decidedly Mannerist. Pulzone may have looked back for inspiration to the more naturalistic early works of Titian, but the bejeweled surfaces of his paintings, their finespun, enameled colors (especially in his religious works) and a tendency to translate living flesh into ageless porcelain all place him squarely in the Mannerist camp. Surely his is a pared-down and chastened Mannerism, but it is Mannerism all the same.

In this respect, an interesting contrast is suggested in the portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi, an early work by El Greco, whom no one ever accused of not being a Mannerist. Though the sitter, a sergeant major of the Knights of Malta, was a friend and associate of Boncompagni, he occupied a far humbler station in society. El Greco suggests this through Anastagi's frankly plebeian pose, through the casual way in which he grabs the hilt of his sword and the fact that his muscular calves are surely those of an infantryman. And his armor is clearly meant for fighting, not, like that of Boncompagni, for show. In all, this remarkably forthright portrait seems to prefigure the naturalism that one associates with Baroque artists like Caravaggio and the Carracci, about a generation later.

Although this is probably not its intention, the Frick show exposes the dangers of pigeonholing artists. In any given age, even painters whose aesthetics are opposed—as was largely the case with El Greco and Pulzone—are apt to have more in common with one another than with the artists of earlier or later generations.

This being the anniversary year of his death, you will be hearing a great deal more about El Greco in the coming months. But for now it is fitting that, at least once, we should celebrate the achievement of Scipione Pulzone, a painter whose considerable talents surely entitle him to greater renown than he has known in centuries.

—Mr. Gardner is a critic whose book "Girolamo Fracastoro: Latin Poetry" has just been published by Harvard University Press.

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